In this episode we went to Rogue Artists Studios in Manchester and spoke to ecxeptional artists Laura Yuile and Anna FC Smith
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Laura’s multidisciplinary practice explores the entanglements between domestic and urban space through matters of community, sustainability, and obsolescence, and the effects of globalisation and technological development. She exhibits internationally and alongside gallery-based exhibitions and events, she has organised a number of projects that filter into the everyday, commercial spaces that her work is engaged with. These have included Comfort Zones - a series of symposia on the subject of comfort zones held in the showrooms of various IKEA stores through the UK and China and a bus tour to a landfill site for Global Shadow Local Mist (2014). ASSET ARREST is an ongoing project and podcast series that addresses issues of financialized housing and real estate and their impact upon communities.
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Anna explores social history, folk culture and ritual through historical and anthropological research. Creating sculpture, installation, performance, and group actions her works emerge as multi-dimensional symbolic collages spanning eras, and forms of material culture. Touching on politics and performative space, she examines power and community, juxtaposing the ‘low culture’ and irreverence of communal tradition with the pageantry and ceremony of governance. Seeking links contemporary society has to its predecessors, she sees history and ritual as means to interpret the present.